Love and Betrayal in Disparate Worlds

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 13, 1999

By
Jeanette Winterson Alfred A. Knopf
; 228 pages; $22
Jeanette Winterson is not known for being an "easy read." In fact, she's one of our most complicated, confounding writers, the kind of old-fashioned fiction magician who can leave one wondering how she got from A to Z without once mentioning the intermediate letters of the alphabet.

Winterson's newest book, the short story collection "The World and Other Places," calls for a little less trepidation, and therefore may be the ideal starting point for those readers who have felt daunted by her novels.

Each short story in the collection, with a few minor exceptions, is as layered and complex as a Winterson novel, with the kind of linguistic gymnastics that Winterson fans have come to expect and with the usual intellectual mazes that have kept fans pondering her books long after turning the last page. However, by their nature, these stories are more welcoming to the reader, as Winterson knows just how much complexity each is capable of holding.

This is an odd collection. It begins with what could have been one of the simplest stories in the book, "The 24-Hour Dog," which appears to be an ode to the narrator's dog but quickly metamorphoses into a narrative on fear and intimacy, the harder rain of love's dangers dissolving any sugary ideals about human- canine companionship. The book closes with another story involving an animal, this one about a child with a pet turtle named Psalms; both story and turtle are as loaded with symbolism as the name would lead one to expect.

In between, Winterson takes us to 17 fictional worlds, donning voices as disparate as those of a rather stuffy Englishman and a third-person tale-telling voice of mythology and fable.

No matter what guise Winterson uses for each particular story, the themes have the staying power of all good literature: love, loss, power and betrayal. Winterson brings to bear her extensive knowledge of literature, history, geography and, especially, natural science. With elegance and subtlety, she weaves this knowledge into the stories, as in this image: "My heart swelled. I had a whale's heart. The arteries of a whale's heart are so wide that a child could crawl through." She begins "Orion," a mythic tale from Artemis' wide perspective, "Here are the coordinates: Five hours, 30 minutes right ascension (the coordinate on the celestial sphere analogous to longitude on earth) and zero declination (at the celestial equator). Any astronomer can tell where you are." Talk about placing the reader.

This sort of specificity grounds the reader so that he or she can fly along on Winterson's gorgeous prose, following into her sometimes fantastic worlds.

In one such world, people have stopped sleeping altogether, and sleep is more than frowned upon. It's a clandestine activity reserved for a select few -- a concept that many insomniac readers may find all too believable.

But Winterson keeps this story from the edge of science fiction with her specifics and her language: "I wound up my clockwork sufficiently to tick out onto the waking streets and buzz a newspaper off the sleep-deprived vendor. Like the rest of the poor in sleep of the coming 21st century he was a money junkie, trading shut- eye for a tight fist."

Readers of Winterson who have been confounded by her chameleonlike refusal to pin her narrators to one gender or sexual orientation will be likewise confounded by some of these stories. But one may find favor with lesbian readers who have wanted a more identifiably lesbian story from Winterson.

In "The Poetics of Sex," Winterson, with her dead-on, courageous refusal to duck, subtitles each section with one of several questions still asked of lesbians, such as "Why Do You Sleep With Girls?" and "Which One of You Is the Man?" The answers that follow in the way are at once oblique and cutting.

The best quality of this book is that the reader can return repeatedly, each time making a small discovery of another slightly disturbing, beautifully crafted world.